Police NSW

The NSW Police Force is one of the largest police organisations in the English speaking world. It's comprised of over 20,000 employees. To help the Police NSW on their digital transformation journey, WorkingMouse modernised some of their current legacy systems.

Following the event, WorkingMouse was contacted by NSW Police Force and given the opportunity to pilot Codebots within the organisation. The project comprised of beginning to modernise their 200 plus legacy Access databases that sit within their operational division.

Achieve the extraordinary

Process

To begin, WorkingMouse started with modernising 7 Fatal Crash Microsoft Access Databases. The offline system is used by the traffic research and intelligence unit as part of their traffic & highway patrol command.

The project was run in an agile fashion, fixing the time but varying the scope based on organisational priorities.

Problem/Opportunity

Prior to the project there were three key issues the team aimed to tackle.

1. The information was stored on outdated Microsoft Access Databases which is not in line with the Department's modern web-based skill set.

2. The support required from the internal IT department was significant due to the databases breaking and the constant reloading of backups.

3. The time it would take for the safety team to copy the data over from the COPS system on a daily basis.

Solution

To solve these issues WorkingMouse (using the Continuous Modernisation Playbook) approached the problem by migrating the 7 databases into a central entity diagram using the firecracker migration pathway. In doing so we were able to simplify the 7 different systems down to 1 new modern web based application.

The application created is now a modern .Net Core (C#) server side with a React client side. The application is in line with Police NSW's modern IT skill set making it easier to run and support. They are now able to host in their on premise environment securely.

In addition to the migration the project team were able to add on several useful behaviours and functionality. The team added the following: